Franklin Book Program: a cultural tool of cold war era

The Cold War waged by the formidable adversaries – the United States of America (USA) and the erstwhile Soviet Union – commenced in1947 following the conclusion of the Second World War. It was also a cultural war, where the combatants vied to win the hearts and minds of people around the globe and where both written and spoken words as well asimageries played a pivotal role. During its commencement, a majority of developing nations were emerging from the imperialist Old-World-Order. But they soon became battlegrounds of rival superpowers – mostly in the ideological and intellectual domain. The US government felt that a propaganda offensive was required – lest the newly independent countries switched to or became adherents of communism. The US government then started to support and set up a wide range of government, quasi-government, and private initiatives that could help it advance a cultural war globally against communism and communist ideology.

The Franklin Book Programs was one such initiative that was launched in 1952, initially as Franklin Publications – a private, not-for-profit organisation that worked to help translate and publish American books in countries of US interest and support the establishment of local book industries in those emerging or developing nations. The initiative was a joint-venture of the American Library Association’s International Relations Committee and the American Book Publishers Council’s Foreign Trade Committee. It was named after the American polymath Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790, writer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, printer, publisher, and philosopher), who was one of the founding fathers of the USA. The contract of Franklin Publications with the US Department of State (subsequently taken over by the newly constituted United States Information Agency or USIA) stated that its mission was to “Stimulate production of books and other publications … [and to] arrange for their distribution through commercial and other channels in countries outside the United States … as a means of promoting better understanding between the people of the United States and other countries” (Amanda Laugesen, 2010). Its subsequent sponsors included the USAID, Ford Foundation, Commonwealth Foundation, Kellogg Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Franklin Book Programs operated from 1952 to 1978, and was engaged in a wide range of programs in several key regions of the world – primarily the Middle East, Pakistan, and Indonesia.It also expanded to Africa and several Latin American countriesin the1960s and 1970s.The US government viewed such programs as handy aides for waging a ‘cultural information’ or propaganda drive across the globe. However, Franklin’s employees were mostly professionals from the publishing industry, and saw their work as fundamentally about the development of book industries in those countries, including efforts to train would-be publishers, teach commercial methods of book promotion and distribution, stimulate local education programs and libraries, and even support literacy campaigns to erect an edifice for the growth of publishing industry. Over the course of almost three decades, Franklin Book Programs helped facilitate the publication of approximately 3,000 titles in numerous languages including Arabic, Armenian, Bangla, Chinese, English, Hausa, Igbo, Indonesian, Malay, Persian, Pashtu, Urdu, and Yoruba.

The Franklin Book Programs established its Dhaka field office in 1955 under the leadership of A T M Abdul Mateen. At least 331 books in Bangla language were published under the program up to 1978. These were mostly published from Dhaka, with a few from Mymensingh, through the combined efforts of about 40 local publishing houses. The books covered a variety of subjects including science, engineering, mathematics, technology, literature including novels and short-stories, juvenile fiction, economics, political science, sociology, history, biography, and education.

Before his appointment at Franklin Books, the director Mateen had received a master’s degree in economics from Aligarh Muslim University in 1949, and then taught as a lecturer of economics and history at the then Ahsanullah Engineering College, Dhaka. He was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship by the US government in 1952 to study international economics at Cornell University, from where he received a master’s degree in 1953. Mateen served as the director of Franklin’s Dhaka office till 1965.

M A Azam served as the managing director of Dhaka office from 1965 to 1967. He was a distinguished civil servant, a US-trained engineer, and an ILO-expert at the Regional Centre for Community Development for the Arab States in Egypt. Azam started his career in 1933 as a college teacher of Kolkata, and later held posts as Director of Industries in the provincial government of East Bengal, Director of Dhaka Technical Institute, and advisor to the UN. He obtained M.Sc. degree from Oklahoma State University, published works in both Bengali and English, and contributed to such renownedpublications as the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Americana Yearbook.

After Azam, the Dhaka office was led by Nurul Alam (1967-70), former instructor and chief of publications and library division at the Pakistan National Institute of Public Administration. Having BA and MA degrees in political science from the University of Dhaka, Alam started his career with the East Pakistan branch of Oxford University Press in 1954. He later organised the Voice of America’s Bangla programs for the province while serving as a cultural affairs specialist at the United States Information Service (USIS) in Dhaka. He also worked at the Dhaka branch of British Council. The Franklin programs’ Dhaka office was lastly headed by Abdul Mannan Chowdhury from March 1970 till the winding up of the organisation in 1978. With an MA in political science, Chowdhury previously worked as the secretary of Franklin’s Dhaka office from 1955 to 1970.

Although the primary focus of the Franklin program in Dhaka was translation of American educational books into Bengali, it also engaged in a number of special projects, especially during the latter years of its operation. These included ‘School-to-School Book Program’, which was an effort to enlist the help of American primary and secondary school-children in raising money to establish small libraries at schools of developing countries like Bangladesh. It aimed to ensure access to supplementary reading materials in local language beyond the available text books. A national advisory committee was constituted in 1973 by the then education secretary of Bangladesh Kabir Chowdhury to select appropriate titles for libraries and choose the recipient schools.

Following two years of planning, the Franklin program in Dhaka started the process of producing a Bangla language encyclopaedia in 1961 based on the Columbia-Viking Desk Encyclopaedia. It was initially started as a two-volume project, but ultimately became a four-volume production due to thickness of the volumes. An eminent scholar named Khan Bahadur Abdul Hakim, who served as President of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh in 1982, was the editor of that encyclopaedia.

Some of the fascinating Bangla translations under the Franklin Book Program that the present scribe had the good fortune of reading during his childhood were: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain; The Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum, Pinto’s Journey by Wilfred S. Bronsen; Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne; Call of the Wild by Jack London; Little Women by Louisa May Alcott; The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck; Alexander the Great by Philip Freeman; Genghis Khan and the Mongol Horde by Harold Lamb; The Crusades by Thomas Asbridge; and Tamerlane by Justin Marozzi.

Dr Helal Uddin Ahmed is a former Editor of Bangladesh Quarterly. [email protected]